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July 20, 2006
I have been incredibly busy with La Main de l’Espoir since my last post. Last week, we finished training the peer educators, and now we are preparing for the Balanie de l’Espoir, which will take place on July 29. The Balanie is a celebration dedicated to educating the Sikoro public about HIV prevention and treatment practices, and will feature all peer educators performing skits that illustrate the five points of the Here Bolo program: hope, identity, transmission, marriage and family, and community.
Working in Mali is both incredibly frustrating and incredibly rewarding, but in the end, the rewards far outweigh the frustration. Any frustration I have stems from the fact that things are simply so much harder to do here – people are frequently late or don’t show up for appointments, materials are impossible to find or far away, and despite the fact that I speak French, I often have difficulty communicating with people because they speak Bambara. Yet despite any occasional frustration I have, the peer educators’ enthusiasm last week made everything well worth it. Each session ran over at least 45 minutes because people were asking so many questions. I also gave the educators a simple 12-question pre and post-assessment test on their HIV knowledge at the beginning and the end of the program. While I have yet to fully analyze the data, I have found that the majority of the participants have a pretty good basic knowledge of HIV prevention and treatment both before and after training. However, I noticed that some participants still held some common misconceptions about HIV - such that HIV-positive people couldn't appear healthy or that one could catch HIV by kissing someone. The sessions were also characterized by a great deal of debate as men described their reluctance to wear condoms and women described their reluctance to not breastfeed despite their knowledge of the benefits of these practices. Therefore, the peer educators' mission will be to not only educate others, but to address the gap between HIV knowledge and preventive practices in Sikoro. After the Balanie is over, Malick, Ramatoulaye and I will begin tracking each peer educator's progress as they begin to educate others in various parts of Sikoro. I believe that if the proper infrastructure can be set up and sustained, the program will be really effective. On the last day of training, we began to practice for the Balanie, and people really came alive when they began performing for their peers.
Besides running Here Bolo, I will also be collaborating with Mme Diarra Assetou Koite to implement Here Bolo at the Bolle Women's Correctional Facility in Bamako beginning on July 31. I met Mme Diarra two weeks ago with Dr. Kone and found her to be a very admirable woman – we discussed AIDS programs in Mali and how they need to be tied to alleviating poverty in order to be effective. Today I visited Bolle with Ramatoulaye and it was one of the most interesting places I have seen in Bamako. I will admit that at first I was really apprehensive – I was picturing large, dirty, stone cold cells filled with women in agony. However, what I was shown instead were compounds that almost resembled dormitories – there were open courtyards where women could talk to each other, and there was actually a day care center for women who were incarcerated when they were pregnant. While there is a separate building for more serious criminals (I did not see this building on my tour), many of the inmates at Bolle are former prostitutes, so their sentences are short, and their incarceration is the direct result of poverty. The system that has been set up at Bolle is actually really interesting in that all of the inmates can financially support themselves with small jobs such as making soap or cloth, so they are slowly preparing for rehabilitation in the community. Bolle also has a real classroom, and some of the women are starting to learn French which is SO important, because it is impossible to get a really good job without French proficiency here. When we run the program, it will be primarily in Bambera, but it is good to know that I will be able to communicate with out first 10 peer educators on a basic level.
Outside of work, I have been enjoying Bamako enormously. Meeting and working with Ramatoulaye is probably one of the best things that happened to me this summer. Last Friday, I met her brother, Mohammed, who actually now lives in Queens and went to St. John’s on a basketball scholarship. Talking to him about Mali was interesting because this visit is his first time back in nine years. It seems that happens with lots of people who leave the developing world – while one can understand perfectly why someone wouldn’t want to go back when they had been living a life of poverty, one also wonders how anything will ever change if people don’t return with their new skills to help their country.
Posted by Madeline DiLorenzo at July 20, 2006 09:47 PM
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